Chapter 17

No element of Europe's modern transformation held a greater significance for the history of humankind than the Industrial Revolution. The global context for this economic transformation was due to the increase in population from about 375 million in 1400 to about 1 billion in the early nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution marks a human response to that dilemma as nonrenewable fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas replaced the previously used renewable energy sources of wind, water, wood, and the muscles power of people and animals. Their ability to farm with more advanced techniques allowed to feed the rapidly growing population. Access to huge new sources of energy gave rise to an enormously increased output of goods and services. It began to grow beyond the textile industry to iron and steel production, railroads and steamships, food processing, and construction. Following this later in the nineteenth century, industrial revolution began to focus on chemicals, electricity, precision machinery, the telegraph and telephone, rubber, printing, and many more things that are essential and useful today. Industrialization soon spread beyond Britain to continental Western Europe and then, in the second half of the century, to the United States, Russia, and Japan.
The Industrial Revolution effected the social classes in Britain. Individual landowning aristocrats suffered little in material terms. Members of the middle class benefited the most. Politically they were liberals, favored constitutional government, private property, free trade, and social reform within limits. The laboring classes suffered most and benefited least from the big transformations of the Industrial Revolution. They had to work in overcrowded and unsanitary cities for long hours for low wages.
Socialist Karl marx spent much of his life in England, where he witnessed the the brutal conditions of Britain's Industrial Revolution on the laboring classes. He believed that industrial capitalism was inherently unstable system, doomed to collapse and would eventually give birth to a classless socialist society. Marx regarded himself as a scientist, embedding in the laws of historical change, and that revolution was a certainty and the socialist future was inevitable.

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